London-based biomethane developer CycleØ has opened a new branch in Ireland and will soon begin rolling out its modular biomethane plants across the country.

CycleØ builds, owns and operates small- to medium-scale modular biomethane plants, which can be quickly shipped and assembled on-site.

This system may mean that smaller-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) plants, which produce biomethane, could become economically viable on Irish farms.

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This model would be fundamentally different from the large-scale centralised AD model currently in the early stages of development across the country.

Economics

Traditionally, the economics of small-scale AD biomethane plants have been challenging without government support, which has yet to be introduced in Ireland.

But the company said that its small-scale biomethane systems can be built economically and it has ample capital to play an active role in helping the biomethane market to take off in Ireland.

CycleØ was founded in 2022 by Ara Partners, a multi-billion private equity firm, after its acquisition of FNXlng, a Spanish company that already has a number of biomethane facilities in operation across Europe.

The company has appointed James Manley as country manager of Ireland and will soon begin making significant investments across the country to ramp up biomethane production, the company said in a statement.

Targets

As of 2021, there were 1,067 biomethane plants in Europe. Just two of those are in Ireland.

In 2022, the Irish Government set the stage for growth, aiming to cover 10% of the gas needs with green gas by 2030.

To meet this target, local production will need to reach 5.7TWh. To put this in context, Ireland produced just 25GWh of biomethane between May 2020 and August 2022.